Apologies for spamming my friends' list
Jan. 2nd, 2007 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eveglassI know I've written too much today, but I don't think I'll be able to get to sleep until I get the thoughts out of my head.
It occurs to me that I don't like what I'm doing. I feel stressed when I'm planning lessons, and I feel stressed when I'm teaching. I am very practiced at traditional, "stand up at the front of the class and talk" teaching. True, I don't have much experience with 2-hour long lectures, but I've done quite a lot of 1-hour ones, and can teach them on a few small pages of bullet-point notes.
ESL teaching is different. The focus is not on me standing up at the front of the room (though it would be very easy to do so), but on the students interacting with each other. The more talking time they get, the better (theoretically) I'm doing my job.
Perhaps it's my inherent perfectionism and high expectations of myself coming through, but I get very stressed trying to prepare lessons, and probably spend far too much time doing so. At the moment, I'm running about 1:1 for hours of prep to hours of class. For larger classes, this might shrink to 30-45 minutes of prep per hour of class. That means that for this week, teaching 3 hours per day, I'm actually spending about 4-6 hours doing work. The prep work is unpaid.
I found myself irrationally jealous this morning of the more experienced teachers, who could walk in without any idea of what they're doing, pick up a book, and have a lesson ready within a half-hour. I can't imagine prepping a 3-hour lesson in a half-hour. I can't imagine how I'd do it. I suppose it's possible, I just don't know how.
Perhaps it's because of the excessive amounts of extra work I'm putting into this contract, but I'm not enjoying myself. Somehow, I always find that I run out of material too fast, and don't know how to stretch it. I manage to bluff my way through, but this is more a testament to my fast-thinking skills than any amount of competance on my part. Trying to ad-lib lessons is extremely stressful for me, I've found, especially when I'm trying to hide the stress and pretend I know what I'm doing.
I just want this contract to be over. I've only done one day, and I'm only teaching one week total, and I'm already stressed and cranky over it. Braindead secretarial jobs are actually looking tempting right now, that's how stressed I am.
I know, at some level, that this is all self-caused. Thousands of people teach English each year, and I'm conceited enough to believe that I'm superior to many if not most of them. If they can do it without going crazy, certainly I can too, can't I?
I think I gave myself a sore throat today from projecting in class. This doesn't help my mood, especially knowing that I need to be awake in less than 8 hours to do it all again tomorrow.
Feh. Writing has apparently not helped my mood. I don't know what I'm going to do. I spent a lot of money and quite a bit of time getting the qualifications to do ESL. And yet I'm not happy and I'm very stressed. I wonder whether I should just find myself a nice secretarial job paying $13-14 per hour and be done with it. It feels beneath me, and yet somehow I think I'd be less stressed if I knew I had less riding on my performance.
On the other hand, given my past history, I'd probably be just as stressed as a secretary, believing that I needed to keep job-hunting for the "right" job while still holding down the secretary one full-time. I really, truly don't know anymore. I though this was what I wanted, and (like so many times when we get what we wanted) I find I don't want it.
Maybe I should just give this more time, let myself get used to the field and what's expected of me, give myself some time to settle in. After all, I only have about 50 hours of ESL teaching experience at this point (though how much that works out to, couting prep hours, I don't want to think about right now). Maybe if I give myself another 6 months, I'll find I enjoy this. Or maybe I'll burn myself out for no external reason. One of the two.
I suppose I should sleep now.
It occurs to me that I don't like what I'm doing. I feel stressed when I'm planning lessons, and I feel stressed when I'm teaching. I am very practiced at traditional, "stand up at the front of the class and talk" teaching. True, I don't have much experience with 2-hour long lectures, but I've done quite a lot of 1-hour ones, and can teach them on a few small pages of bullet-point notes.
ESL teaching is different. The focus is not on me standing up at the front of the room (though it would be very easy to do so), but on the students interacting with each other. The more talking time they get, the better (theoretically) I'm doing my job.
Perhaps it's my inherent perfectionism and high expectations of myself coming through, but I get very stressed trying to prepare lessons, and probably spend far too much time doing so. At the moment, I'm running about 1:1 for hours of prep to hours of class. For larger classes, this might shrink to 30-45 minutes of prep per hour of class. That means that for this week, teaching 3 hours per day, I'm actually spending about 4-6 hours doing work. The prep work is unpaid.
I found myself irrationally jealous this morning of the more experienced teachers, who could walk in without any idea of what they're doing, pick up a book, and have a lesson ready within a half-hour. I can't imagine prepping a 3-hour lesson in a half-hour. I can't imagine how I'd do it. I suppose it's possible, I just don't know how.
Perhaps it's because of the excessive amounts of extra work I'm putting into this contract, but I'm not enjoying myself. Somehow, I always find that I run out of material too fast, and don't know how to stretch it. I manage to bluff my way through, but this is more a testament to my fast-thinking skills than any amount of competance on my part. Trying to ad-lib lessons is extremely stressful for me, I've found, especially when I'm trying to hide the stress and pretend I know what I'm doing.
I just want this contract to be over. I've only done one day, and I'm only teaching one week total, and I'm already stressed and cranky over it. Braindead secretarial jobs are actually looking tempting right now, that's how stressed I am.
I know, at some level, that this is all self-caused. Thousands of people teach English each year, and I'm conceited enough to believe that I'm superior to many if not most of them. If they can do it without going crazy, certainly I can too, can't I?
I think I gave myself a sore throat today from projecting in class. This doesn't help my mood, especially knowing that I need to be awake in less than 8 hours to do it all again tomorrow.
Feh. Writing has apparently not helped my mood. I don't know what I'm going to do. I spent a lot of money and quite a bit of time getting the qualifications to do ESL. And yet I'm not happy and I'm very stressed. I wonder whether I should just find myself a nice secretarial job paying $13-14 per hour and be done with it. It feels beneath me, and yet somehow I think I'd be less stressed if I knew I had less riding on my performance.
On the other hand, given my past history, I'd probably be just as stressed as a secretary, believing that I needed to keep job-hunting for the "right" job while still holding down the secretary one full-time. I really, truly don't know anymore. I though this was what I wanted, and (like so many times when we get what we wanted) I find I don't want it.
Maybe I should just give this more time, let myself get used to the field and what's expected of me, give myself some time to settle in. After all, I only have about 50 hours of ESL teaching experience at this point (though how much that works out to, couting prep hours, I don't want to think about right now). Maybe if I give myself another 6 months, I'll find I enjoy this. Or maybe I'll burn myself out for no external reason. One of the two.
I suppose I should sleep now.
